Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The Three Pillars of Observability: Traces, and Two Things My Agents Never Look At - O11yCon 2026

'The runbook lost. The trace is the documentation now.' In his O11yCon 2026 closing keynote, Corey Quinn of Duckbill Group makes the case that when your primary reader is an, not a person, are the only pillar built to survive.

AI Model Drift: How to Keep Models Reliable

AI model drift is when an AI system's performance and accuracy degrades over time because the data, user behavior, or business environment has changed since the model was trained or evaluated. Even if latency, uptime, and infrastructure metrics remain healthy, model quality can quietly decline, leading to less accurate predictions, inconsistent responses, and reduced user trust.

Introducing AI BubbleUp

BubbleUp has always been the fastest way to figure out what a group of outliers have in common. Draw a box around a band of slow traces, a cluster of errors, or any set of events you're interested in, and BubbleUp compares that selection to the baseline across every dimension you've sent us. It's how Honeycomb users find the "unknown unknowns" that dashboards can’t show you.

Signal vs. Spend: Building Cost-Aware Observability at Slack - O11yCon 2026

It started with a single log line taking up a massive amount of volume: 500 million emissions per hour. Pulling that thread led Emma and Steven into Slack's broader logging pipeline: 311 billion logs per day at 4.4M/sec peak, with no volume limits, no per-service attribution, and no feedback to the teams generating the noise.

Building an AI Observability Agent: Lessons from the Trenches - Stripe at O11yCon 2026

Stripe shares lessons from building an incident investigation agent, from context-window blowups to why the final 5% still needs a human. In this O11yCon 2026 talk, they dig into what it takes to go from 'it works' to 'it works reliably,' including how pointing agents at like Honeycomb's speeds up on-call investigations.

AMA Recap: More Answers From the Observability Engineering Authors

Last week, we sat down with the authors of Observability Engineering for a live AMA. We ended up getting so many questions (pre-submitted and live) that we couldn't get through them all. Charity, Liz, George, and Austin kindly stuck around afterward to answer more, ranging from low-hanging observability fruits and telemetry to AI and what software engineers can do that Claude can't. Missed the live session? Watch it on demand now.

Spend More Time Talking to Humans

A few months ago, I noticed something happening. I would spend all day working with LLMs—prompting them, reviewing their work, and correcting them—and when I wasn’t working on my own code, I was reviewing LLM-generated code. By the end of the day, I was exhausted. This was a very unusual thing for me: I’ve been a software developer at startups for 30 years, and while sometimes I might have gotten stressed out, I had never been exhausted by the actual act of writing code.

Honeycomb Named a Visionary in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms

For the third consecutive year, Honeycomb has been recognized for its Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision, and we believe for its strong vision around fast, flexible, high-cardinality querying that helps engineers understand not just that something broke, but why. The software development lifecycle has collapsed. The neat sequence of plan, build, test, and ship that teams have relied on for 20 years is now happening in a single afternoon. AI writes a large share of the code.

What Comes Next: Honeycomb Demos at O11yCon 2026

In this session at O11yCon, Purvi Kanal, Jamie Danielson, and Martin Holman demoed the new Canvas. Canvas now understands OpenTelemetry GenAI semantic conventions, and can show agent invocations, LLM calls, and tool calls all in one trace view. Humans and agents can work in the same place, with skills that let each team encode their own expertise so both the agent and their colleagues can use it. Multiplayer support means you can see your teammates' cursors and share charts.

Embracing the Code Review Bottleneck

Roughly a year ago, I left Honeycomb’s SRE team to join the newly formed Tenant team, which works on our Private Cloud offering. This team held some significant challenges on its roadmap if it wanted to demonstrate that the offering was possible, would be worth the cost, and could be done without representing a heavy tax on the rest of the organization.